Surprise of Nike: Josh Shipp

Tracy Pierson

07/10/2003

Considered a good prospect coming into the Nike Camp, <b>Josh Shipp</b> from Los Angeles might have improved his stock the most of any camper this week. Here's his current recruiting status, at least until the new recruiting wave hits...

Josh Shipp, 6-5 SR SG, Los Angeles (Calif.) Fairfax, was not only the biggest surprise among west coast prospects at the Nike All-American Camp, he was probably the biggest surprise nationally. It's not that Shipp wasn't considered a good prospect before, which he was. But the performance he put on at Nike this week was so impressive it will more than likely vault him onto many national prospect lists, and onto the recruiting lists of many more college programs.

The result of Shipp's performance hasn't really resonated yet with his recruitment, since college coaches can't contact players or their AAU coaches during the July evaluation period. So, it's not possible to quantify how many college coaches were impressed enough to either start recruiting Shipp – or significantly step up their recruitment of him – but it's probably safe to say that it will be a considerable amount.

Going into the Nike Camp Shipp said that he was fairly wide open, but it wasn't because he was anticipating such a break-out performance. "I just have thought that I wanted to wait," Shipp said. "I don't even know how long I'll wait to really start thinking about it all. I guess the best way to put it is that I'm still wide open."

When asked about the schools that have been recruiting him seriously, Shipp said, "Stanford, and they've said they want me to just raise my verbal score on the SAT."

In fact, Shipp, who has a 3.2 and a 1010 SAT, said he wasn't at all discouraged about re-taking the SAT to improve his verbal score for Stanford admission, and was planning on taking a SAT prep course in the fall before re-taking the test.

Shipp did say, though, that his current favorite is Washington, and that he was pretty certain he wanted to take an official visit to the Seattle campus. "I think I want to visit Washington, and probably Iowa State," he said. "But I really don't know about my visits yet."